In this book Tiya Miles explores the popular yet troubling
phenomenon of "ghost tours," frequently promoted and experienced at
plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the
South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers
by routinely relying on stories of enslaved black specters. But who
are these ghosts? Examining popular sites and stories from these
tours, Miles shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and
skew African American history to produce representations of slavery
for commercial gain. "Dark tourism" often highlights the most
sensationalist and macabre aspects of slavery, from salacious
sexual ties between white masters and black women slaves to the
physical abuse and torture of black bodies to the supposedly exotic
nature of African spiritual practices. Because the realities of
slavery are largely absent from these tours, Miles reveals how they
continue to feed problematic "Old South" narratives and erase the
hard truths of the Civil War era. In an incisive and engaging work,
Miles uses these troubling cases to shine light on how we feel
about the Civil War and race, and how the ghosts of the past are
still with us.